As Energy Efficiency Booms, Buildings Get a Brain

The Cleantech Group recently released a comprehensive analysis of energy efficiency innovations in commercial office buildings. The findings are promising -- and lucrative -- for commercial building owners, managers and developers, let alone smart energy investors.

“Commercial office buildings consume 40% of the electricity produced in the U.S. and 18% of total U.S. energy,” said Sheeraz Haji, president of the Cleantech Group. “Our analysis shows that energy efficiency is poised to overtake solar as a top investment category in 2010, and commercial buildings represent a prime target. Lower investment costs, financial incentives, and faster payback periods are fueling product competition as data-driven technologies battle over the building’s brain.”

As we opined in a previous post, commercial, industrial and municipal buildings are dumb, inefficient and, above all, wasteful. If you own or manage a building (or a portfolio of buildings), you are unnecessarily wasting money every day. But, if your building has a brain -- if it's intelligent and you are intelligent in your management of your asset -- you, well, get smart. Andrew DeGuire, vice president, strategy and acquisitions with Johnson Controls, explains:

True building efficiency can only be achieved when executives take a more holistic view of their portfolio of buildings. Robust building control systems can be networked within buildings and across a portfolio to integrate security, lighting and HVAC with other enterprise applications, providing real-time data to track performance, decrease operating costs, and set future efficiency goals.

According to the Cleantech report, the focus on performance is driving an information and communication technologies invasion of buildings to enable greater visibility and control as vendors compete to be the gateway to building intelligence. Data-driven energy efficiency products and services look poised to grow, including low-powered Wi-Fi sensors, energy management software, building automation, and smart lighting and windows.

We could not agree more. A decade ago, few computers and information systems were networked; now, it's commonplace. Today, few buildings (and their energy-consuming equipment, specifically lighting and cooling systems) are networked. Ten years from now, we may look back and chortle at the back-then arcane -- boy, they were dumb! -- and wasteful condition of buildings.